Esri is set to announce an open-source software bridge that makes it faster and easier to move mapping data between ArcGIS and R. The aim is to help R users tap into an organization's GIS data housed within ArcGIS, a popular platform for high-powered geo-analysis, without the need to generate intermediate files. However, the code will also work to pull in any vector or tabular data supported by ArcGIS -- including but not limited to Shapefiles -- whether or not that data is stored within